The whole truth?

A couple of years ago a late-season snowstorm hit the Catskills, and I called all the resorts to find out which one got the most snow. One resort, which I won’t name here, told me “We’re saying 18 inches.”

When I got there I discovered it was more like four inches. My reply, I realized, should have been “Maybe you’re saying 18 inches, but how much did you GET?”

I take my skiing seriously, which is why I don’t like to feel tricked by resorts prone to exaggeration. Which brings me to the point of this post: an announcement today from Vermont’s Mount Snow that they’re changing the way they report how much terrain is open.

Instead of saying how many trails are open — a time-honored and fairly understandable standard — they’re moving to report how much ski acreage is open.

“The bottom line is that a trail count does not tell the whole story,” said Tim Boyd, president of Mount Snow’s parent company, Peak Resorts, in a press release.

The new move, unique to the New England ski industry, will make acreage the standard measurement of open terrain. The overall percentage of available terrain – calculated using open acreage and not trails – will also be prominently reported.

“In the past, we could report 28 open trails, but in reality there were only 4 top to bottom runs made up of connectors and ‘lower’ and ‘upper’ portions of trails,” he said. “Then, if we reported 54 out of 107 trails it gave the impression that our mountain was 50% open, when in fact, only about 25 percent of our terrain was skiable.”

It’s a laudable goal, but it will be curious to see what skiers think of the change and whether other ski resorts follow their lead. Ski resorts have always used the vagueries of the English language to
help sales. What other industry could invent a term like “frozen granular” for ice? What other industry could manage to “double” the size of its facilities simply by adding the words “upper” and “lower” to its trails?

When skiers spend up to $85 for a ski pass, they should know exactly what they’re buying.